


Two Suckers in an Icebox

by Snickfic



Series: winterpocalypse [1]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Apocalypse, Cabin Fic, Hurt/Comfort, Winter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-10-03
Updated: 2011-10-03
Packaged: 2017-10-24 06:40:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/260257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Faith and Giles hole up in a cabin to ride out the winter that's ending the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Suckers in an Icebox

The cabin’s stocked; when or by what is no problem of Faith’s, not when she’s been half-dragging Giles for what seems likes weeks, though she thinks the worst has probably lasted barely a day. The cabin’s stocked, food and fuel and blankets, and that’s enough for now.

Giles is sitting on the summer-cabin couch – clawed at the corners, stained – with his elbows on his knees, staring down at his crusted boots. He hasn’t moved since she put him there.

Faith piles split logs into the woodstove, kindling below, newsprint below that. For a moment, matchbox resting in her palm, she thinks about the one story she heard about, one of the days when she bothered to go to school: a man, a dog, cold like this, and not enough matches. No cabin, either.

The box of matches weigh heavier in her hand than they should. She’d sooner flip God off than pray to him, supposing he ever showed, but maybe this is prayer, this gratitude that grabs hold of her gut and squeezes.

Then again, might just be the starvation talking.

Fire started, flue opened, Faith crosses the room to the countertop and sink that serves for a kitchen. She snags the first thing she finds – Chicken of the Sea – and then stares at the can, wondering if this is what’s she been hauling her knife around for all this time.

But no; there’s a can opener in one of the drawers. That’s even better than the tuna. The world’s frozen in a vise that she’s thinking might never thaw, there’s exactly one human being besides herself that she’s certain is still alive, and hey, can opener.

If she starts laughing, she might never stop. Or she might kill something. Seeing as Giles and herself are the only two options at the moment, better not.

Once she gets herself all composed – _ladylike_ and _domestic_ are the words that come to her, and they alone are almost enough to bring on the manic laughter – she gets the can open and eats everything in it, fingers to mouth, in about ten seconds. Then she opens another can and takes it Giles.

He’s still sitting on the couch. For a moment she wonders if _he’s_ frozen, some freaky after-effect of this blizzard that is in no way natural. He’s breathing, though. Might be just that the thought of unlacing those boots is taking the last of his energy.

Might be he’s afraid of what he’ll find when he does. It’s one of those things no one ever told her about being a Slayer: better circulation. Maybe nobody’s ever really tested it before. She’s pretty sure all her toes are still unfrozen, anyway.

“Check it, G. Gourmet.” Faith offers him the can and a fork she found. “There’s other things, but they need cooking.”

“Faith,” he says, like his voice is thawing but not quite there. It takes a minute for his eyes to focus on her hand, and then when he shifts his elbow from his knee to reach, he nearly falls over.

So she feeds him. She props him up against the back of the couch and she feeds him, a forkful at a time.

This is not Faith Lehane’s gig, this care-and-feeding shit.

She does it anyway.

Finally, Giles mumbles something and lifts his hand. The can’s still half-full, but she takes it anyway. “Water?” he says, more clearly.

“Yeah. Sure.” She tries the tap, but nothing comes out. Pipes frozen or turned off, it doesn’t matter. She cracks open the door and swipes a tin cup through the drift. Once she’s got the door slammed shut again, she sets the cup on the woodstove.

“It’s not like I haven’t seen cold before,” she says, conversational, no expectation of an answer. He’s already said more since they got to the cabin than he had in the twenty-four hours before. You’re supposed to talk people through shock, though, right? “February in Southie. Streets frozen slick enough to play hockey on. Sidewalks, too, and shit if the whole damn city didn’t run out of rock salt at least once a winter. Swimming in snow while your breath freezes halfway down your throat. And sucks to be you if you’ve got one of the apartments with the old-time radiator and no off switch. Outside it’s clear and cold enough you could freeze in a minute flat just staring up at all those stars, and inside you’re sweating through your skivvies.”

She shakes the cup and listens to the slush slopping in it. “A lot of people couldn’t deal, you know? Cut out for Florida or wherever as soon as they got a break. Probably froze the demons out, too, now that I think about it.

“Anyway,” she says, “That was my winter wonderland,” threadbare mittens and charity jacket and all.

It isn’t the temperature that’s chilling her bones now, though she’d bet her last socks it’s at least twenty below. It isn’t humidity; none could hang in air this cold.

Faith has never had much use for the mystical shit, but she can’t help feeling this deep freeze is more than physical. It’s a winter of the soul, pansy-ass as that sounds. It’s pressing in like they’d all felt the First pressing in, years back, rolling over them like a thundercloud and frying their nerves with little shocks of lightning.

“It’s the end of the world, isn’t it?” she says. “This.”

Giles shifts his gaze to her. “I believe it is.”

“Thought so.” She hands the cup of melted snow to Giles and plunks next to him on the couch. “I always thought there’d be, you know, demons and shit.” Things for her to kill. She was going to take it down with her, whatever it was.

Not so much, it looks like now.

“Did you see Willow?” Giles asks.

Faith remembers her: chalk-faced, veins on her face as thick and dark as electrical cables, eyes black, hair black. “I saw her.”

“And Spike?”

Spike fought like a vampire, eyes yellow-wild as he roared through his fangs. In three years of fighting the good fight alongside him, Faith never saw that before. She’d never even seen his wrinklies before. “Yeah.”

“Something’s calling forth the demonic, the black magic.” Giles fumbles at the zipper of his coat until Faith unzips it for him. It’s hardly warm enough for this, but he’s got something in mind, so she helps him push the rest of the way out of the coat. He rolls up the sleeves on his left arm, and there it is: the tattoo she’s seen, asked about, teased him about, but never heard the story of. The lines look darker now, edges more sharply defined than Faith remembers. “A mere remnant,” he says. “The demon I was marked for is gone, but the mark remains.”

It does more than that. The skin around it is swollen, mottled in red. The thing could have been inked yesterday.

“And you, Faith? Do you feel it?”

“What?” She’s lost the conversation.

“The demon in you. Do you feel it?”

She thinks back to the laughter she didn’t laugh, that felt like murder. “It make me want to kill things?”

“Possibly.”

She takes in a deep breath and pushes to her feet. “Good thing I’ve got lots of experience now in not killing things.” Although she’s about to do in another of those tuna cans.

When she comes back from the kitchen area again, Giles is asleep, head lolled onto the back of the sofa, arm flung out. The tattoo curls and spirals across his skin with a fluidity that looks almost alive. Faith takes a blanket off the end of the sofa and drapes it over Giles, careful not to touch the tattoo as she tucks his arm under, and then she huddles in under a blanket of her own and thinks about sleep.

Outside, the wind wails like some possessed spirit-thing.

~*~*~

Faith wakes up to the sound of Giles coughing. It’s a harsh, wet cough that sounds like it needs, at the very least, someplace warmer than here. Faith blinks her eyes open and realizes the fire must have gone out.

“You okay there?” she says to Giles, doubled over at the other end of the sofa.

When the fit passes, he straightens a little. Croakily he says, “I believe a hot compress and a strong cup of tea will do wonders.”

Faith stares a moment until he turns to her, humor hanging impish on his lips, and then she laughs straight out. The rush of cold air in her lungs sends her into her own coughing fit. When she’s done, she says, “We got hot water, anyway. Betcha there’s coffee.”

“Why can’t these apocalypses ever happen in civilized places,” he mumbles, but Faith can tell he’s already fading.

“Coffee,” she says, getting up to poke at the dead fire. She doesn’t like the look of Giles; she hopes like fuck that it’s just a cold or some lightweight flu, enough to make him headachey and raspy for a few days and no more. That, she can handle.

It’s light out again, she realizes. With the fact comes the knowledge that if she doesn’t get out of this cabin in the next ten minutes and break something, she’ll break something inside instead. Possibly the cabin.

She shrugs on the heavy jacket Giles had pushed into her hands – God, when? Forty-eight hours ago? – and calls out, “Gotta use the little girl’s outhouse. Back in a few.” She doesn’t wait for an answer. She pulls the open the door, which is crusted shut so heavily she’s not sure regular human strength could have opened it; crawls over the berm behind it, fallen from the cabin’s steel roof; and walks out into the world.

“Damn,” she says.

In every direction: snow. Conical snow the heights of trees; lumpy snow in bush-shaped heaps. Sky a sickly, jaundiced color, but hanging low and heavy with the certainty of snow.

She knew they were way the hell away from anywhere else. That was the whole plan two days ago: put as much distance as possible between them and and the dimensional rift crackling lightning-bright over the wilds. So they drove the car until the car gave out in the cold, and after that they marched through ever-higher drifts, only knowing they were still on the road by the ditches on either side. Faith was half-hoping for lights, _people_ , but just a structure was enough.

But this is like nowhere Faith has ever seen or ever wanted to see. This is an alien planet she’s looking on.

It occurs to her that that might be more than metaphor; she thinks again about the rift, that vast bleeding dimensional wound, and then she shuts the thought away.

Now that she’s out here, she realizes she does need to piss. She fights through the waist-deep snow all the way around the house until she realizes that the low rectangular drift off one corner of the cabin is probably what she’s looking for. She shoves away enough of the drift to open the door and, once she’s inside, manages not to freeze her ass to the seat, which she calls a victory.

By the time she’s done, even her Slayer metabolism can’t ward off the shivers. She hasn’t broken anything yet, but just the battle from point A to point B has taken all the fight out of her, and she’s hungry enough to eat boot leather, though they’re not that desperate. Yet.

Scurvy, she thinks. She’s going to die of scurvy.

But she isn’t, she determines as she wades back to the house. They’re gonna wait out the storms and then they are trekking back to civilization. Hell yes.

That the storms might not end isn’t something she’s willing to consider yet.


End file.
